WordPress Linking: All Links Covered

If you have a WordPress site, you must be familiar with the term WordPress linking. It refers to a technique that enables you to add either internal or external hyperlinks to your WordPress posts. The main purpose of this technique is to provide your audience with actual references for the facts you include in your content.

To some people, adding some hyperlinks to their posts could be something complicated and sometimes problematic. Let’s face it: there are several different ways of doing it, and some of them are not that simple. However, they are actually not that difficult if you follow a couple of simple steps provided in this article.

How to Link on WordPress

As described earlier, in simple terms WordPress linking means adding hyperlinks to your posts. The primary way of adding links to your posts is by simply using the visual editor feature on WordPress:

1. Highlight the text which you want to insert the hyperlink to – the anchor text.
2. Click the “Insert/edit link” menu available on the visual editor toolbar.
3. A box will pop up. Type in the link that you want to insert in the URL column.
4. In case you want to insert a link that refers to any internal content you have on your website, simply type in what you want to search in the Search column under the “Or link to existing content” option.
5. If you want to remove any hyperlink you have added, simply click the hyperlinked text and click the “Remove link” button.

Alternative WordPress Linking Methods

Now that you know the main method of adding hyperlinks to your posts, we can look at some alternatives:

1. Text Widget Links

You can easily create a custom widget and put it on the sidebar of your website. You only need to use the ‘Text Widget” feature in which you could add the desired text and HTML codes that would link to the page you want. To enable this feature:

1. Go to Appearance menu and choose Widget
2. Click and drag the Text widget to the sidebar
3. Insert the HTML code, fill in the title column, and click save.

2. Titles and No-Follow Links

When it comes to backlinks, Google will rank pages that receive a lot of organic backlinks higher on the SERP. Unfortunately, this system has been misused by numerous people who keep spamming blogs and online forums only to insert a link to their website.

To counter these dirty deeds, Google introduced the no-follow link concept. In short, this is your way to tell Google that the link should not be counted as an effort to build a backlink to another site.

To insert a no-follow link to your posts, you could use the Title and Nofollow for Links plugin. Here are the steps for using it:

1. Install the “Title and Nofollow for Links” plugin.
2. Highlight the text and click the “Insert/edit link” menu on the toolbar.
3. You will notice that there is a new checkbox titled “Add rel=”nofollow” to link. Tick this box.

3. Button links

You could insert links in the form of buttons into your posts and pages. This is a nice WordPress linking alternative method you could try.

There are two main ways to do it. First, you could do it manually, which I wouldn’t recommend since the process can be very complicated.

Secondly, you can install the Forget About Shortcode Buttons plugin. This is far simpler than the first option. The plugin allows you to create additional buttons that link to other websites. You can customize your own buttons by choosing their type, size, color, and border.

4. External Links

If you are using the External Links plugin, you can add a small icon – like the ones you find at Wikipedia – next to the hyperlink. This icon tells your audience that clicking the link will take them to an external website.

After installing the External Links plugin, you simply need to do the following steps:

1. Go to Settings and then click External Links.
2. Tick the Add Icons checkbox.
3. Click the Save Changes button.

5. Navigation Menu Links

With WordPress, you could create navigation menus on your website. You only need to go to Appearance and click Menus.

Conclusion

Inserting hyperlinks to WordPress posts is something that people do to get more traffic and back up the information they put in their articles. There are several different methods for WordPress linking, including:

• Text widget links
• Title and no-follow links
• Button links
• External links
• Navigation menu links

Happy linking!